Purple Pirates

A friend of mine recently corralled a group of us for what she calls a collaborative learning experiment. It's a sort of loose and informal homeschooling group. There's a new topic each week and every family decides for themselves how they'll explore it. Then we share what we've done via our facebook group. This past week's topic was "purple". When I told Levi about it he got unusually excited and started talking about how he wanted to be a purple pirate, and he would, of course, need a purple parrot. His vision just got more elaborate from there involving feathers and boats. The kid is into details.
Our week turned out to be crazy busy, so I only just got around to helping him accomplish his purple pirate plans. It turned out to be a lot of fun for both kiddos. We made purple pirate hats. Don't ask me how they glued their skulls on so straight. I think there's a perfectionist streak in both of them. Okay, maybe Sophia's was more of an accident.

Then Levi made a purple parrot out of pipe cleaners while Sophia played grab the pipe cleaners and run.

When it was all said and done we had a couple of purple pirates on our hands...

Here's Levi's best purple pirate face...

And, a closeup of his parrot....

I was hoping he wouldn't notice that we hadn't made a boat. But, as soon as we walked out of the door to take photos and play he said, "Mama, we need to make a boat!". Thankfully, he found a boat instead....

The kids played purple pirates in my parents' yard. As I was watching, Levi looked at me and said in the most sincere voice ever, "Mama, the dogs really think I'm a purple pirate!"